2 men arrested on capital murder charges after fatal shooting at illegal Dallas game room

Two men have been arrested after police say they killed a man while robbing a Pleasant Grove game room last weekend.

Roman Arielyus Lynn Davis, 19, and Anthony Cain Sheckells, 27, each face one count of capital murder in the fatal shooting of Demarcus Thurman early Saturday.

Dallas police were called just after 4 a.m. that day to a business in the 8200 block of Scyene Road that they say had been converted to an illegal game room. Thurman, 29, who had been shot in the chest, was lying on the floor and was pronounced dead minutes later.

Detectives wrote in an arrest-warrant affidavit that they spoke to a witness who said that Thurman, who was working the door that night, had let in two men who seemed to know him.

One of the men — who police allege was Davis — pulled out a handgun and demanded money from Thurman, the witness said. After Thurman handed over some cash, the men got into a fight and the robber who police identified as Davis fired one shot, striking Thurman, the affidavit says.

The men then fled, firing several more shots at the game room’s door, according to the affidavit.

Police wrote in the affidavit that surveillance footage from the game room showed Thurman handing over money at gunpoint but that the video stopped playing before the shooting.

When detectives notified Thurman’s wife about the slaying, she asked them to describe the robbers. After hearing their physical descriptions, she pulled up Sheckells’ profile on Facebook, the affidavit says.

She told detectives that men they had described sounded identical to Sheckells and his brother, with whom she said Thurman had been having trouble with for several years. Facebook profiles and public records indicate that Davis and Sheckells are siblings.

Davis and Sheckells were taken into custody Wednesday. When police searched the home they were at, they reported finding a black hoodie belonging to Sheckells that had blood on the sleeves and other clothes that matched what they’d seen in the surveillance video, the affidavit says.

They remained at the Dallas County jail Friday, with bail set at $1 million each.

At the time of the shooting, Davis was serving deferred-adjudication probation after pleading guilty to two counts of assault from a 2019 incident, as well as an unrelated charge of evading arrest, court records show. In the assault case, he was accused of threatening a female relative and a man with a gun.

Sheckells was on probation in two separate cases: for a 2019 drug-possession charge stemming from an incident in which Davis also was arrested, as well as in a 2016 case where he was accused of robbing a man at knifepoint and pleaded to a lesser charge of theft, according to court records.